Marty Townsend

In this interview, Marty Townsend, a leading WAC scholar who has been involved in the field since the 1980s, discusses WAC with Terry Myers Zawacki, another leading WAC scholar. The interview was conducted February 20, 2026.

About Marty Townsend

Marty Thompson is SjheEmerita Professor at the University of Missouri. She directed the university's Campus Writing Program from 1991-2006 and received a Gold Chalk award for training and mentoring graduate students. She authored numerous book chapters and journal articles on writing-across-the-curriculum and consulted at more than 80 institutions inside and outside the United States. Her work with academic writing has taken her to universities in countries including China, Costa Rica, Korea, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and South Africa. She was part of an international team that in 2013 developed and taught perhaps the earliest faculty writing workshop in Russia, hosted by Lomonosov State University in Moscow. Her first of three WAC-related research trips to China (1999, 2007, 2013) produced the first-known publication on WAC in China, and she subsequently served as an informant for Introducing WAC into China: Feasibility and Adaptation (Springer, 2012). She and her Campus Writing Program colleagues hosted the 2004 biennial national Writing Across the Curriculum Conference in St. Louis, declaring their conference theme to be "WAC from an International Perspective," featuring an Australian education scholar as keynoter, and actively seeking international participants. Beginning with the following WAC Conference, hosted by Clemson University in 2006, the conference formally changed its title to the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference. For her many contributions to the university and the wider writing studies community, the University of Missouri honored her with the Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education in 2014. She is a fellow of the Bryn Mawr Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, a former literacy consultant to The Ford Foundation, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum. She sits on the Editorial Board of WPA: Journal of the Council of Writing Program Aministrators.

Credits

Video Production: Mike Palmquist and Zakery R. Muñoz

Closed Caption Editing: Camaryn Wheeler

Additional credits are provided at the end of the video.